Timeline of Typography

The following timeline of typography milestones is part of the digital companion materials to Type Matters: The Rhetoricity of Letterforms published by Parlor Press.

Comments

Learning to Code: Comments Count

I like comments in computer programming source code. I've never been the programmer to claim, "My code doesn't need comments." Maybe it is because I've always worked on so many projects that I need comments to remind me what I was thinking when I entered the source code into the text editor. Most programmers end up in a similar situation. They look at a function and wonder, "Why did I do it this way?" Tangent : I also like comments in my "human" writing projects. One of the sad consequences of moving to digital media is that we might lose all the little marginalia authors and editors leave on manuscript drafts. That thought, the desire to preserve my notes, is worthy of its own blog post — so watch for a post on writing software and notes. Here are my rules for comments: Source code files should begin with identifying comments and an update log. Functions, subroutines, and blocks of code should have at least one descriptive comment.

Returning to a Schedule

You probably noticed I took something of a leave from blogging much of this month. My wife and I took turns being ill with the flu, which upended our schedules, including our writing projects. Because work had priority, we had to delay website and blog updates while we attempted to recover the lost two weeks. Recovery has been a little slow, at least for me, since I was already dealing with some minor physical issues. In the coming weeks, I hope to return to my normal schedule of posting to each of my blogs at least once weekly. Ideally, I will manage to post on some of the ideas I've jotted down and you'll see two or three posts a week the blogs. Unfortunately, as I'm recovering we're getting ready to move into a new house. I'll be ending the school year, moving, and preparing to teach summer school. At least I know where my hours go each day: they are consumed by a dozen things other than my writing. I do keep telling myself that sleep should be optional, yet

MarsEdit and Blogging

MarsEdit (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Mailing posts to blogs, a practice I adopted in 2005, allows a blogger like me to store copies of draft posts within email. If Blogger , WordPress, or the blogging platform of the moment crashes or for some other reason eats my posts, at least I have the original drafts of most entries. I find having such a nicely organized archive convenient — much easier than remembering to archive posts from Blogger or WordPress to my computer. With this post, I am testing MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software based on recent reviews, including an overview on 9to5Mac . Composing posts an email offers a fast way to prepare draft blogs, but the email does not always work well if you want to include basic formatting, images, and links to online resources. Submitting to Blogger via Apple Mail often produced complex HTML with unnecessary font and paragraph formatting styles. Problems with rich text led me to convert blog entries to plaintext in Apple Mail

Poet Ponders the Digital

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